As it stands, a significant part of transferable shares in companies are managed through intermediaries due to legal or technical reasons and direct interaction between shareholders and the investee company is often costly, ineffective or impossible, particularly cross-border.
The recent revision of the Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD) is aimed at further facilitating interaction between listed companies and their shareholders, giving companies the right to identify their shareholders and requiring intermediaries to transmit information relating to the exercise of shareholder rights and facilitating the exercise of these rights.
The SRD empowers the Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers (‘DG JUST’) to adopt implementing acts in order to specify minimum requirements concerning shareholder identification, transmission of information in the chain of intermediaries and facilitation of exercise of shareholder rights. To this end, DG JUST set up a group of experts on technical aspects of corporate governance processes and launched a call for applications. The group consists of a total of 12 members. Only one represents individual shareholders.
Read more:
- Expert group on technical aspects of corporate governance processes
- Shareholder Rights Directive: what is new? - European Commission
- Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending the Shareholder Rights Directive
- Shareholders' rights in EU companies: Council formal adoption